


Compromised

by AlchemyAlice



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: M/M, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:21:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25514950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlchemyAlice/pseuds/AlchemyAlice
Summary: Illya knew he'd return to Moscow some day, but not like this.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Comments: 24
Kudos: 276





	Compromised

**Author's Note:**

> I found this half-finished in gdocs and decided to slap it into something resembling completion. It feels a little like a warm-up for my other fics in this fandom, so similar themes and tropes abound, but whatever! Get off my cloud drive, random scribbles!

“Clamp.”

“Mm.”

“Blue wire.”

“Mm.”

“Dial. No, the one with the square bit, the—the—yes, thank you.”

Illya is fairly certain he’s going to crack his own jaw right down the centre just by clenching so much. He breathes, very deeply, very evenly, through his nose.

“You sound like a bull awaiting his toreador when you do that.”

“Do not push me, Solo. I am not averse to making suppositories out of your lockpicks.”

“Kinky,” Solo comments, just as the safe pops open. No alarm sounds this time. Small mercies. 

He hands back Solo’s equipment with bad grace and checks the perimeter one more time. 

“Three minutes,” Solo says, looking at his watch.

“I’m aware,” Illya replies, and sifts carefully through the papers. Normally, Solo would insist upon looking through the goods himself, but this time, they’re in Cyrillic, and Solo claims only speaking fluency in Russian, so it’s fallen to Illya to find what they’ve been searching for. He must trust that Solo is as good a lookout as says he is, and terribly, he does.

“They’re moving on the third floor. Two minutes,” Solo reports. 

Illya grunts acknowledgement and continues leafing through. Finally, he finds what he’s looking for—plans for black market distribution of chemical weapons, courtesy of THRUSH. He folds them carefully, and stuffs them into his inside jacket pocket. 

“Let’s go,” he says.

Solo shuts the safe door with a flourish and leads the way to the exit. Illya has to steer him away from heat and motion sensors a couple of times, pushing at his hip or shoulder from behind to redirect him. Each time, Solo gives him a sardonic look over his shoulder, but does as he’s told. 

They leave undetected, and nothing explodes. 

“Drink?” Solo suggests, as they slide into the beautiful hunter green Jaguar that Waverly has supplied them with this time.

Illya exhales. “Only if you have vodka.”

Solo gives him one of those lazy, sideways looks, half-lidded and mockingly offended. “Peril, we’re friends. I shall never deny you your national tastes.”

Illya scoffs, and they speed off into the night. 

-

The horrible thing is that Illya can, given some distance, admit that this _partnership_ is going rather well. For one thing, they keep saving each other. Now, it’s rather expected—they’re on a _team,_ after all—but the fact remains, they each know for a fact that there are times when it would have been perfectly understandable to leave one’s counterpart behind, when it would have been _safer,_ in fact, to give up and call the whole thing a tragedy, the loss of a good agent, but these things happen, don’t you know? Too many times when that would have been the appropriate response. 

However, after they agreed, for good or ill, to co-commit treason on the balcony of an Italian hotel, they keep going back for each other. 

A week and half later, Illya gets trapped in the catacombs of Istanbul with a broken ankle, and Solo spends hours combing the place alone, when he should have been reporting back to base. He ends up half-carrying Illya out--no mean feat, considering Illya’s size. Later, he gets a slap on the wrist from Waverly for ignoring protocol, and doesn’t blink.

Several months later, he gets shot while he and Illya are undermining a French terrorist group, and Illya maybe, just slightly, sees red. Thirteen dead terrorists and a blown up base later, and they’re on a helicopter out of Calais, Illya stitching Solo up while in the air, Solo grimacing and giving him a strange, assessing look the whole way. 

So yes, they seem to do well by each other. At first, Illya thought it was a tit-for-tat sort of thing, but they started losing track of the score pretty quickly, particularly after THRUSH became their primary nemesis, so now it’s just a thing that they do. Somehow. Illya doesn’t pretend to understand it, particularly when Solo is so clearly going to be responsible for 90% of his future dental work.

-

There are also...moments. 

In Barcelona, they end up meeting a contact in a very strange tapas bar carved out of a bolthole in the Old Town, and Illya ends up crammed into the corner of a booth with Napoleon such that he can feel the expansion of Napoleon’s chest with every inhale. Napoleon is off all evening, and nearly misses their contact altogether. 

“All right?” Illya asks him afterwards.

Napoleon’s smile is odd, more self-deprecating than Illya is used to from him. “Fine, Peril. Don’t mind me.” 

In Finland, Illya gets to return the favor of saving Napoleon from drowning, pulling him out of a frozen river outside of Turku. They don’t talk much, during or after, but Illya finds himself sticking close to Napoleon’s side as they finish out the mission, and he can’t tell whether it’s Napoleon gravitating towards him day after day, or the reverse. At one point, he finds himself stopping to check Napoleon’s pulse as they get ready to leave the safehouse, counting off the beat of his heart and getting to twenty before realizing that Napoleon has gone still and watchful. 

“All right?” it’s Napoleon’s turn to say, tipping his chin up, allowing Illya access.

Illya nods, and swallows. “Fine.” Shoves his hand in his pocket and barges out of the door.

In Sardinia, Napoleon runs into a fence from his former life. Illya instantly dislikes it, dislikes _him_ —the fence reminds him of the Vinciguerras, a veneer of civility stretched thin over a moral vacuum. 

“Alfonso knows the players in this area better than I do, nowadays,” Napoleon says. “I take lunch with him, we can probably cut this excursion short by several days.”

“You’ve been out of the game for over a decade,” Gaby points out. “He has no reason to trust you.”

“Never did in the first place,” Napoleon replies, baring his teeth slightly. “And the feeling was mutual.”

So they do lunch. It runs long, full of reminiscences and inside jokes that Illya’s Italian can’t fully keep up with. At the end, Alfonso leans forward and whispers something in Solo’s ear that his mic doesn’t pick up, and in response, Solo tips his head down and apologetically shakes his head.

“Involved?” Alfonso says, sitting back. He looks a little disappointed. 

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Ah. Like that.”

Napoleon’s gaze flicks upward, and then he smiles. “In a manner of speaking,” he repeats.

Illya packs and unpacks and reorganizes their equipment in his hotel room that evening, making more noise than he intends to, and doesn’t ask Napoleon if he’s all right, and Napoleon returns the favor. 

So there are moments, which he knows are there. Illya can’t name them for fear of making them real.

-

After all, none of it matters, because all of this is only temporary. He’ll be recalled by the KGB, and Solo by the CIA, soon enough. The fact that they’ve managed five missions already is more than he’d been expecting, but it can’t last.

(Still, he can’t forget the expression on Solo’s face, when he’d turned and tossed Illya’s father’s watch at him. Like he was signing his death warrant and making peace with it at the same time.)

(He can’t forget, but he’s trying.)

Gaby needles him about it eventually, of course, because Gaby cuts to the heart of every matter, a scalpel of a girl in every sense of the word.

“Just admit you like him already,” she says, over breakfast the next day, the THRUSH documents spread across the table, along with the beginnings of Gaby’s translation and decryption notes. They’re in Madrid, and she’s dressed like a proper Spanish lady, all in black and scarlet. “It really wouldn’t be all that unexpected. He’s very likeable.”

When not playing the ingenue or the feckless heiress or the innocent wife, Gaby has for all intents and purposes become their commanding officer, receiving reports from the ground and passing them back to Waverly, and occasionally acting as their getaway driver. Now that she’s no longer just a way of getting to her wayward father, Waverly has given her the all-clear to receive training in combat readiness and field work, and she’s taking lessons in sniper riflery and small aircraft in her spare time, too, which will no doubt make her even more invaluable than she already is as their, well, minder. 

(Illya tries not to be resentful of her seniority. She had, after all, done quite a good job of keeping him and Solo from killing each other that first week, which in retrospect is very impressive. Also, she’s _Gaby,_ and Illya hadn’t been lying when he said he liked strong women.)

Nevertheless— 

“I don’t like him! I do not have to like him to not want him dead. He’s arrogant and smug and _American—_ ”

“And I’m German. Surely you should be more inclined to dislike me, historically.”

“You are not annoying.”

“No, I am exceedingly charming. But as it happens, so is he.”

“He respects you!”

Gaby pauses, and then looks at him over her teacup in that serious, intent way that always gets him flustered. “You think he doesn’t respect you?”

Illya doesn’t know, not really, so he decides to study his coffee, turning the mug around between his hands in small, even increments. 

Gaby sighs. “Boys.”

“Morning, all,” Solo breezes in, suit freshly pressed, a peacock from head to toe. “How go the THRUSH papers?”

“A few leads, but they’ve changed their codes,” Gaby complains. “It’s like they’re trying to make our lives more difficult.”

“Yes, _just_ like that,” Illya says dryly, finishing his coffee. 

Solo raises his eyebrows at Gaby. “He has a sense of humour,” he says, wide-eyed.

Gaby makes a prim o-shape with her mouth, looking between him and Illya. 

Illya glowers, and snatches one of the translation sheets up. “You dropped an article here,” he notes, as pointedly as he can manage, “And you are perhaps looking at a variation on a NEMA encryption.” He does not see fit to mention the Soviet version already in use, the Fialka. He commits enough marginal acts of treason on a weekly basis as it is. 

“Splendid, why didn’t you say so before?” Solo asks. 

“We were discussing other matters before you came in,” Gaby says with a bland smile. Sometimes, Illya wants to kiss her. This is not one of those times.

“Oh,” Solo says knowingly, even though he couldn’t possibly know anything. “Well, then.”

“We will need the corresponding machine,” Illya says, trying valiantly to stay on task. “It is doubtful it was kept in the same facility as the documents, but it would need to be close by, in order to translate when needed.”

“So we have a lead?”

“We do.”

“Right then,” Solo says briskly, grabbing a spare cup off of the room service cart and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Where shall we start?”

Illya exhales. That is much better. Even if it’s only temporary.

-

Their search for the machine brings them to a hotel safe in the center of the city, which Gaby has to aid Solo in getting to, because there are apparently all sorts of mechanical hazards between the lobby and the safe which just scream ‘front’. 

“THRUSH is in the hotel business, huh?” Gaby says into Illya’s earpiece, as she and Solo enter the lobby, arm in arm, a rich American and his local mistress. 

“Seems so,” Solo replies. “Wonder what their profits are like?”

“Chatter,” Illya says, tapping his fingers on the car armrest. He really, really dislikes being confined to lookout. 

“Spoilsport,” Solo mutters, and then more loudly, to someone else, “Good evening. A room please, for the night.”

Illya listens to him and the concierge exchange pleasantries and go through the check-in process while running through the gamut of electrical systems buzzing through the hotel’s systems. THRUSH didn’t do a particularly good job of cloaking themselves, once you knew where to look— high electricity bills, radio broadcasts at odd hours. They didn’t specifically announce THRUSH, but they certainly implied clandestine activity. Now that they know about this particular base, Illya can design interceptors for their signals.

He’s only just managing to calibrate his interceptor with the hotel’s frequency when Gaby and Solo begin their break-in. Solo has gotten them past the guards with his usual charm and evasion, and Gaby was now working to disable the locks on the freight elevator. 

(“Of course I could disable the elevator,” Solo had said before, when Illya had been making a case for leaving Gaby as the lookout, “But she’s better at it.”

And Gaby had smiled at him, both smug and genuine, and Illya had found himself, once again, irrationally angry at Solo. His dentist was going to _hate_ him.)

“Come on, darling, I know you want to— ah!” Gaby croons through the earpiece, doing Illya’s mental state no favours. 

“Nicely done,” Solo says, and then they go silent again as they begin their journey downwards towards the vault. 

Illya breathes, and continues adjusting the interceptor. Finally, he hones in. The hotel has a line of communication open, and it’s transmitting morse code. Grabbing a notepad and pencil, he begins transcribing it, his ear split between the sounds of Solo cracking a vault, and the long-short-long bursts of static. 

Then— 

“Hm. Well,” Solo says.

From his vantage point outside the hotel, Illya can see several guards suddenly putting their hands up to their earpieces and begin walking quickly towards the exits. He sighs.

“That’s probably not good,” Gaby says.

“Got the machine?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Time to go. Peril, we’re going to need a getaway car.”

Illya rolls his eyes, puts away his notes and interceptor, and starts the engine.

-

The machine is slightly broken by the time they get it to safety. Gaby promises she can fix it. Solo nods, like this was an obvious part of the plan, and goes to pour himself a drink. Illya washes his hands of them both, and works on decoding the morse signal he’d been transcribing. 

Halfway through the transcription, he drops his pen, hand suddenly nerveless. The pen clatters, a startling sound against the relative quiet of Gaby’s tinkering. 

Solo, surprisingly, is at his side instantly. “Peril?”

“There is a mole in the KGB,” Illya says. He stares into the middle distance. He knows exactly what this means. This will be even worse than being called back. 

“There is a THRUSH informant in the KGB.”

-

“It doesn’t have to be you,” Solo says. He’s sitting next to Illya on the couch, Gaby on his other side. They both run hot, and Illya is struck viscerally by the desire to lean into them both, to leech some of that body heat from them because he’s cold from head to toe, his hands bloodless and a faint whine buzzing in his ears. Instead, he hunches in, rubbing his wrists absently.

“Who else would?” he says flatly. “We tell Oleg there is a mole, he kicks it up to his commanding officer, somewhere along the way, there is maybe a leak, mole finds out. We get Waverly to warn his counterpart, same thing maybe, or maybe KGB doesn’t believe him, interprets it badly. Half my government refuses to admit THRUSH even exists. Who better to find the mole than me, when no one else knows we know, when I am expected to hate this whole arrangement, this team?” 

He realizes that he’s having trouble breathing. He hadn’t been aware of how much this possibility terrified him, how much he didn’t want to go back, not if it meant staying, now that he knows something outside of it. He hasn’t spoken this much all at once in months, maybe years, and it’s made his throat dry.

He’s aware, distantly, that Gaby has a hand on his back, rubbing gently, and Solo has covered his hand with his own, stilling it over his father’s watch. 

“Okay, so maybe it has to be you,” Solo allows. Gaby glares at him over Illya’s head, and he amends, “But you’re not doing it alone.”

“You get spotted in Moscow, and KGB will kill all of us,” Illya says sharply.

“So we won’t be spotted,” Gaby says. “We’ll lay low. Waverly will help us, if he knows we’re just following THRUSH.”

“Hm,” Solo says, tapping his fingers, and as a consequence, tapping Illya’s hand. Illya can’t bring himself to pull away.

Gaby raises an eyebrow. “I know that face. You have an idea. Possibly a risky one.”

“What is life without risk?” Solo drawls. Then he sobers. “I might have something of a plan, yes. It will mean showing some of our hand, though.”

“How much?” Illya asks.

Solo meets his gaze head on, and there’s something steady in his look, not unlike when he’d thrown Illya the watch, that makes Illya want to trust. “I’m not going to put you in any more danger than I possibly have to,” he says. “And feel free to say no, once you’ve heard the proposal.”

Illya believes him. He nods.

“Break it down for me,” Gaby says. “And I’ll sell it to Waverly.”

-

The plan involves hiding in plain sight. It’s the type of con Solo is best at, which Illya supposes he isn’t surprised by. 

Solo and Gaby enter Moscow as UNCLE agents, but Illya does not. Illya enters as estranged ex-UNCLE agent, impatient with the inadequacies of his foreign counterparts, and willing to only lead them as far as Moscow’s ports, where they are on a wild goose chase for some black market chemical weapons that definitely don’t belong to THRUSH or any other such nonsense. 

Illya, while not a natural con man like Solo, has experienced enough genuine frustration with his team that it is not a struggle to fake it for the KGB polygraph.

Oleg looks unsurprised, and possibly even a little pleased to see him back, particularly when he gets off the phone with a disappointed, cowed-sounding Waverly (who had taken to his role with nearly comical aplomb).

“I see you’ve seen the wisdom of our ways above theirs, Kuryakin,” he says. “Done playing at friendship with international busybodies?”

“Quite done,” Illya nods. 

“Good. We’ll have to keep you on desk duty for a month or so, just to make sure you haven’t left any loose ends abroad. After that, we’ll see what we can use you for.”

“Thank you, sir.” It’s precisely as both he and Solo had predicted, and exactly what they want. 

Illya puts another few ticks in his mental list of the times he’s betrayed his country. It’s starting to sting less and less.

He hates it, just a little.

-

Moscow is as frigidly glamorous as Illya remembers it, and he is watched day and night, because apparently he is no longer the trusted, closely groomed soldier that had gone to East Berlin to stop Gaby Teller from crossing to the West.

He doesn’t bother shaking his tails, because he must prove that he has nothing to hide. It means, however, that he can’t see either Gaby or Napoleon, except in small, fleeting moments where they don’t even cross paths, just close in on each other before diverting away, asymptotic. He allows himself the smallest windows to slip his followers and gather information, barely enough time to check for its relevance. He doesn’t want to know what he finds until it forms a full picture; if he’s caught halfway through, he wants his insights to be useless, mere trifling accidents.

For a month, he is on desk duty, as promised. He keeps his head down, does his duties. He hadn’t ever had real friendships among his coworkers here, so there are no relationships to pick up again, for which he’s thankful—he isn’t sure how well he would have been able to manage that additional layer of subterfuge.

The loneliness is its own sort of interrogation, though. 

He can’t help thinking, over and over again, that this isn’t how he imagined returning to his homeland. Worse, that when he tries to remember what he _had_ imagined, he can’t find it. Maybe he’d stopped imagining, somewhere along the way. 

His hands shake when he has that thought, right in the middle of a briefing, and he has to excuse himself to the washroom for several minutes. He is convinced that his colleagues give him strange looks, afterwards. 

He works, he breathes. 

His mother invites him to dinner, and he goes, but they have nothing to talk about. She doesn’t tell him, as she kisses his cheeks at the door, to come back. But then, they had made it a policy never to lie to each other back when he was a boy, when his father had made omissions that he could not save them from. 

Six weeks in, he is sent on a cursory errand to Leningrad, and as he throws his overnight bag up into the overhead shelf in readiness to catch a few hours’ sleep, the door to his compartment slides open and familiar footfalls sound.

“There are watchers here too,” he observes, not turning around.

“Yes,” Solo agrees. “So act like you don’t want to see me.”

“Not difficult.”

“Ouch.”

Illya turns and makes a face. “What are you doing here?”

Solo looks alarmingly serious. He reaches inside his breast pocket and pulls out an envelope. “Burn after reading,” he says. “You know the drill.”

“You could have sent this before getting on a train with me,” Illya points out.

Solo shook his head. “Gaby has business in Moscow she can’t leave behind, and I think after reading that you’ll know why.” He hesitates, and then reaches forward and touches the back of Illya’s wrist. Illya barely prevents himself from drawing a sharp breath. He realizes suddenly that he had grown accustomed to Solo’s diffident touches before coming back to Russia, and that he had missed them horribly in the interim. 

“Please be careful, Illya,” Solo was saying. “I’ll be watching if anything goes wrong.” 

And then he’s gone, and Illya’s wrist is tingling, and he continues to stare at the closed envelope for nearly a minute before he can bring himself to read it. 

When he does, he has to fumble backwards to find his seat and fall heavily into its cushions, his heart beating too fast, something scarlet and ugly clawing at his insides. 

Gaby’s found the mole. 

It’s Oleg.

-

For a long while, Illya won’t remember what happens in Leningrad. It doesn’t matter much; the errand had been just that—an errand, unstrenuous, whose function is mainly to keep Illya out of the way while business is done in Moscow. He is aware of Solo shadowing him, in bits and pieces, by newsstands and underneath theater marquees. He finds himself hoarding those glimpses, wrapping himself tightly around them, like they will somehow keep him from flying away. 

Oleg. He had never once commented on Illya’s past, on his family or his scars. Illya hadn’t liked him, but he had _trusted_ him. 

He ties up loose ends and takes the same overnight train back to Moscow. When he arrives, Oleg is waiting for him on the platform. Illya spots him, and his hands tremble. 

He goes straight up to him as soon as the train doors open. “Sir,” he says.

“Kuryakin. All’s well?”

“No problems, sir.” Illya is much taller than him, and still manages to feel small in his presence, his briefcase heavy in his hand. He looks up at the clock on the platform, and as he does, sees Napoleon exit the train several carriages over. He doesn’t look at him directly, just takes in the time—7:57 AM—and looks back at Oleg. “Any reason for the pickup?”

“Walk with me.”

They fold into Oleg’s car. After driving several minutes, Oleg says, “Agent Solo made contact with you. What was his purpose?”

Illya had considered this scenario several times since Solo left him in the train carriage. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “He wanted to set up a meeting. Shall I go?”

“They want you back in,” Oleg snorts. “I wouldn’t indulge them.” 

Illya shrugs. “Could give us information.”

“UNCLE’s concerns are not Russia’s concerns.”

Illya shrugs again, and adds a nod. He feels strangely detached from the world, like he isn’t in this car at all, that his stillness is neither a product of his control nor the loss of it, that instead he simply doesn’t exist. The only connection he can feel is the trickle of sweat that pools at the small of his back, abrading against his jacket and the cheap upholstery of the seat cushion. He resists the urge to flex his hand against the door. He supposes it makes sense; this whole time in Moscow has been imaginary, a farewell tour, and he hadn’t even known it. 

He nearly misses the car that pulls up behind them on Tverskaya, one lane over, two cars back in the morning commuter traffic. Several more intersections pass before he recognizes the driver. 

He then weighs his options very carefully. 

“Sir,” he says mildly, after several more intersections, “we are being followed.”

He watches the same consideration twitch across Oleg’s features. Then the smallest purse of lips.

“You are still under supervision,” he replies.

Evasion. All right.

“Ah,” he says, keeping his tone very even. He thinks of Solo, drinking sedative and laying down on the sofa to lose consciousness gracefully. “Must be a reassignment. I haven’t seen that woman on my rotation before. Though she does look familiar.”

Oleg doesn’t say anything. Then he turns left on Mokhovaya, away from the Kremlin.

Illya’s gun is in his suitcase. Stupid. But he has a knife in his boot. 

He counts his breaths. Watches the patterns of the streetlights. 

As they enter the next intersection, he grabs the wheel and wrenches it. 

-

Broken glass. Car horns. A gasped, sucking breath of polluted air.

-

“Get up, Peril. We’ve gotta go.”

A shoulder under his. Arm around his waist.

Illya slurs, “Ankle’s not—”

“Yeah, we know. Probably broken again.”

“And the evidence…?”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on. We’ve got you.”

-

Illya wakes up warm. Traffic sounds outside, but muffled. Closer in, the sound of breathing and shifting cloth. He opens his eyes and sees the vague contours of a hotel room. Opening them hurt, though, so he shuts them again. His head is pillowed on something warmer and firmer than a pillow. He catches the scent of Gaby’s perfume, and something spicier—Solo. 

Instead of saying anything, he just tightens his hand into a fist over the sheets. It stings; lacerations make themselves known across his knuckles and on the meat of his forearm. He’s pretty sure he’s been bandaged up.

“He lives,” Napoleon observes, with muttered irony. 

An arm, thin and wiry, tightens around Illya’s waist. “Good.” 

“Oleg?”

“Dead. In the crash, it wasn’t you.”

“I crashed the car.”

“Mm. Hard to crash a car with a specific outcome in mind.”

“I knew what could happen.”

A hand lands on the crown of his head and then fingers dig into the base of his skull, where it meets his spine. It’s simultaneously too hard and not hard enough. “Yes. You also knew what could happen to you at the same time.”

“Idiot,” Gaby snarls into his shoulder. “We were a full ten minutes—”

“You were seven minutes away,” Illya corrects into the meat of Napoleon’s thigh, because that’s what is holding his head up, and it smells of fine cotton and bergamot. “I saw you behind that THRUSH agent, when you pulled onto Tverskaya. And I saw you crossing the street near the art museum, Solo.”

“I’ve never run so fast in my life,” Napoleon admits. “I saw you meet him in the station and hailed a cab as soon as I could, and when traffic stopped I got out and ran.”

Illya hums. He is still very tired. He could probably go back to sleep and no one would stop him. Still, “Where are we?”

“West Berlin. We stopped as soon as we could.”

“How—?”

“I’m still not entirely sure,” Napoleon says, in a way that indicates he is sharing a look with Gaby. She just grunts. “Let’s just say that we pulled whatever strings were necessary.”

“You were conscious for some of it, which helped,” Gaby adds. 

Illya tries to think back and gets a headache for his efforts. He stops trying.

“Was I…?”

“You were very angry,” Napoleon allows. “But we’d been expecting that for some time. You did far better than any of us could have expected, really.”

The words are pretty, but Illya still feels his stomach clench in shame. Behind him, Gaby presses closer.

“You didn’t do anything,” she says. “You wanted to, but you held it together. It worked out fine.”

“Because you were there.”

Napoleon snorts, incredulous. “Of course because we were there. Where else would we be?”

Gaby hugs him even more tightly, and then withdraws. “If you’re awake, we can move again. I’ll check in.”

“Thank you, Teller.”

She slides off the bed and steps into view for a brief moment to kiss Napoleon’s cheek. She looks unearthly and pale in the dim light of the bedside table lamp, and as she stands back, she looks down at Illya with an expression he can’t fully parse.

“To be clear, I wouldn’t have agreed to Napoleon’s plan unless I thought it would work,” she says. “And that depended on you. So thank you, for proving us both right.” She touches his shoulder. “We fly to London in five hours. Rest more if you can.”

She slips out the door.

“Gaby is far better at being sincere than I am,” Napoleon says, after a long pause. He hasn’t stopped working his fingers along the back of Illya’s skull, and the weight of it has begun to have a soporific effect. Illya is only half aware of him speaking. “Nonetheless, I echo her sentiments. We put you under enormous strain. But I never for a moment believed you wouldn’t succeed.”

Illya tries to digest that. The sourness in his stomach remains. “I take it my cover has been blown.”

Napoleon sighs. “Yes.”

“When you planned this, did you think this would happen?”

The hand against his skull went still. “I would have been stupid not to consider the possibility. But I thought you’d have considered it, too. I interpreted your consent to encompass that risk.”

Illya nods. He hadn’t considered it, but in retrospect, it had been a glaring act of denial not to.

“In the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t take any joy from you being burned this way,” Napoleon adds, very carefully. “But the idea of you staying with us does hold a strong appeal.”

“‘Us’?” Illya echoes. “You’re still with the CIA.”

“Not really. I made their lives difficult for the vast majority of my tenure; ultimately, they’ll be glad to wash their hands of me. Paperwork’s nearly done, last I checked.”

That’s news to Illya. He tilts his head to look up at Napoleon, who winces. “Didn’t want to jinx it,” he admits.

Illya hums. He can understand that. He doesn’t know how to feel about the rest. He has the thought that he had only visited his mother once in the weeks that he’d been in Moscow. He doesn’t know if he’d have done any differently if he’d known this was a last trip. 

Napoleon takes an audible breath, and then blurts, looking down at Illya, “Did I do the right thing?” 

Illya can’t help it; he raises an eyebrow. “No ‘right thing’ in this business,” he replies. “You know that.”

Napoleon exhales harshly and looks away. It’s upsetting enough that Illya makes himself roll upright to face him properly, which in turn alerts him to at least two broken ribs and a wrenched shoulder. 

He makes a small noise as he shifts, and Napoleon snaps, “Lie back down, you’re supposed to be resting.”

“We have five hours, and then will be on a plane for another three,” Illya says, and finishes sitting up, crossing his legs on the bed. Napoleon looks about ready to bolt, so he reaches forward and grabs his wrist. Napoleon freezes, but doesn’t look at him. 

“Napoleon,” he says, watching him. “I did agree to it, didn’t I?”

“You take duty very seriously, Peril, I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Napoleon mutters.

“So do you,” Illya replies, and when Napoleon makes a noise of disagreement, he shakes his head. “Duty to your team, if not your country.”

“Hm.”

“It was the right thing for the mission,” Illya says. He looks at where his hand covers Napoleon’s on the blanket, the difference in sizes, the way the shadows fall. “The consequences are what they are.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I am, too,” Illya admits. “But I don’t think I will regret it, in the end.”

“No?” Napoleon sounds wary. Illya doesn’t look up. There’s something fascinating to him about their hands.

“No.” 

A pause, and then Napoleon shifts. Illya leans back to give him room, but all he does is turn his palm into Illya’s, and then his hand is sliding up, tracing over a layer of bandages, fingertips ghosting over the sensitive skin of Illya’s elbow, curling around his inner bicep. Illya watches, a distant ringing in his ears. Napoleon is suddenly very close, closer than he had been, even before. 

“Illya,” he starts, and he still sounds so cautious. Like he still believes he’s making a mistake.

 _All those moments,_ Illya thinks suddenly. “They were already real,” he murmurs aloud.

In long-sought clarity, he meets Napoleon halfway, tender and unhurried, in the lamplight.

-

Gaby looks between them on the flight, over the top of a fashion magazine. She blinks slow like a cat, and says, “If I ever have to bring this up with Waverly, this collaboration is over.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Napoleon says. 

Illya tips his head back against the seat cushion, and looks out the window at the receding ground. The back of Napoleon’s hand rests against the exposed skin of Illya’s wrist on their shared armrest, a sliver of warmth that leads him, with the quiet rumble of engines, out of the cold.


End file.
